Filler: San Diego, CA 5/14/94:
Main Show:
Encore:
Filler: San Diego, CA 5/14/94:
Filler: Bob Marley & The Wailers:
Filler: 7/14/91:
Encore:
Filler: Saratoga, 6/26/95:
Finale: (w/ Neil Young & Sarah McLachlan)
*** Set II ***
*** Pink Floyd "Dark Side of the Moon" ***
*** Encore ***
* = acoustic; dedicated to Wendy and Lisa, two women who Trey and Mike had met the night
before in an "underground bar".
% = acoustic; dedicated to the people at the Dead Goat Saloon where Trey and Mike played an
open mic night the night before; Trey was very chatty, talking about getting free drinks
and karoake, and how one day, the band pictured what it would be like if EVERYBODY from
the show got up on stage with them as they sang, so they were going to sing Bittersweet
Motel picturing everyone in the arena on the stage with them, and no one in the crowd;
played with a "Freebird ending", similar to the 07/20/98 Poor Heart.
^ = During MOMA Dance, there is a very clear tease from Trey and Page of the Stones' Monkey
Man (from Let It Bleed). It's over either the first or second chorus of "the moma dance...
the moma dance", and Trey and Page play the distinctive Stones intro to Monkey Man. Get
the tape...it's there, and very obvious (provided you are a fan of Let it Bleed).
& = preceded by Trey talking about how great it was to be playing the E Center (emphasizing
the E); narration about Jimmy going to Vegas and finding it too crowded and crazy (one
interpretation being that Trey was possibly placing himself in the role of Jimmy and
explaining the unusual ending to Ghost on Halloween, when he walked off the stage
during Ghost, given that he commented on how overwhelming it had been and that he'd just
lost it, followed by a comment about how everyone has an off night which drew cheers
from the crowd of about 4000 in attendance) so he (Jimmy) decided to hitchhike to Salt
Lake City, Utah and the driver was listening to Dark Side of the Moon; Phish then
proceeds to play the entire album as a treat for the small crowd which came out for
the show.
# = Nirvana cover; first time played.
David Byrne: Your taping policy, which some people will be familiar with but for other people, they'll think, "What's going on here? They're allowing people to, essentially, make bootlegs." And to some people, they might think that the record company would just go nuts. This is gonna undercut album sales. John Fishman: They didn't love it. But it had been something we'd been doing for years and it got to a point where when we got on to a major label, it just didn't feel like the right thing to do. David Byrne: To cut it out. John Fishman: Yeah. To cut it out. To the fans. And also, I think for years it had just been free advertising for the band. Especially in your earlier stages. Trey Anastasio: There's a great example of that. We did our first road trip to Colorado. We did seven or eight nights at this club in Telluride. We drove 40 or 50 hours in a van and just played every night. And those shows were all taped and there was probably between eight and fifteen people, the same eight and fifteen people that came every night. David Byrne: They were doing that drive too. Trey Anastasio: Well, they were local. They came down the first night. And we were doing strange things on stage where we would switch instruments and do one-act plays and stuff. Anyway, these shows all got taped and then we left. A year or two later, we came back to Colorado and we had an audience that, because these tapes had spread, they were familiar with all our songs, not just the ones that were on the albums. And it enabled us to continue playing those kinds of shows. You don't have to be selling an album. You're just playing whatever you want to play. So it's been a big help to us. David Byrne: One of your Halloween concerts, some years back, you decided to surprise the fans and you did the Beatles White Album, top to bottom. Apparently, no one knew this was coming. But of course, the next year, they were expecting something like that. I think the next year you did the Quadrophenia record. And then you did a record that I was involved with which was kind of a surprise for me, too. And it's ambitious. What made you decide to do that? Trey Anastasio: We did a show somewhere down South about a year before that first Halloween show. And because we have this habit of mixing up the set lists, we thought that it would be a shock to play our own album, which was Hoist, exactly as is. Normally we improvise. It was the most shocking thing we could do. So we played the whole album top to bottom exactly as it lays on plastic. And afterwards we were talking to some fans and we were jokingly boasting, "Oh, we'll play any album ever recorded." And that gave us the idea that next Halloween, let's do that as a musical costume. So we did the White Album. David Byrne: How do you get inside another band's head like that? Page McConnel: You don't know how it's gonna affect you or what you're gonna pull away from it. With the Beatles White Album, obviously the beautiful songs that they wrote, and so many of them, the melodies and the orchestration... We really tried to get the orchestration down between the four instruments as best we could. The next year we did the Who album and we were in Rosemont Horizon in Chicago, which is a big arena, and playing a Who album in an arena gives you a sense of, "Oh man, they were writing for this venue." And then when we did "Remain In Light," it may have had, in some ways, the biggest effect on us because we really learned the grooves. We tried to get inside the grooves that were on the album. And I know for me personally, I took so much away from that. And the sort of groove-oriented playing that we've done in the last few years, repetition, pulling things out, putting it back. All that sort of thing. A lot of it was from learning that. Mike Gordon: It becomes a study. A meditation. We were listening to the album a lot during the fall before Halloween and practicing it and like you said, getting in the heads of the people who made it without knowing them necessarily. So we come away with a lot. Trey Anastasio: We spent a year in your head.